A Comparison of Cine Lenses on the Red Epic Dragon

…Shot on RED Dragon 5K, this guide is displayed in 4K if you’ve got an ultraHD monitor check it out!

We compared Angenieux, Cooke, Zeiss, ARRI Fujinon, RED Pro and Canon Prime lenses, both primes and zooms, to give us an idea of what each lens visually looked like compared to each other. To compare these lenses, we used Daufenbach Camera’s Epic-M RED Dragon 6K sensor (captured in 5K) to capture the image. We also used 50mm as our base focal length, and for the one lens where a 50mm wasn’t available, we used a 35mm.

This is not meant to be a technical specifications comparison. Mostly because we don’t know the technical answers! But we can see the characteristics, qualities, and even the emotion of a lens, especially when different cinema lenses are compared side by side. We hope this guide helps you make the right lens choice for your next commercial or film production.

NOTE: For a baseline Color Correction, Kelly Armstrong from Color Playground says, “we chose the most “color neutral” lens to set our initial, “base” grade to, the RED Pro Prime. Primarily using the supplied chip chart, gain levels were kept under peak 100 and pedestal was left well above 0 so any anomalies with how each lens handled shadows or highlights could be easily seen and compared. This base correction was applied to each image regardless of which lens was used.”

There also is a ProRes 4:4:4 option if you are interested in seeing full color space, but it’s 10.5GB so send a note and we’ll get you a link!…

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